THREE
Ireland, America and King Mob, 1774–1780
IN EARLY 1774 EDMUND BURKE was facing an imminent and enforced departure from the House of Commons. But characteristically his first reaction was to think not of himself but of William. Thanks to his ever-generous patron Lord Verney, William Burke had been elected for Great Bedwyn in Wiltshire in 1766. But Lord Verney’s finances were now such that this seat too would be lost; and as William had graciously given way to Edmund in 1765, so he should have the priority now. All the more so since no seat meant no immunity from prosecution, and so no protection from his numerous and pressing creditors. At Burke’s urging William was duly enabled to stand for Haslemere in Surrey, but was defeated. Judgements were soon filed against him in the Court of King’s Bench.
For Burke himself the parliamentary landscape was considerably more complicated than it had been in 1765. In the modern era, it is a truism that no two constituencies are quite alike. Various in their political geography and party affiliation, constituencies also widely differ in the volunteer associations which select and adopt candidates, and then – it is hoped – campaign for them to win office. Surprisingly often the result is to form a long-term bond of loyalty and affection, which ties MP and constituency together through political thick and thin. Sometimes, however, the counterpart of a ‘safe’ seat, with a solid majority already in place, is a constituency association only too aware of its power to choose the MP – and willing to choose another if the current incumbent does not toe the line on its favoured issues.
Eighteenth-century constituencies were quite different, owing far more to individual patronage and informal groups of supporters than to local party organization. The most famous of them today are perhaps the ‘rotten boroughs’ such as Dunwich, which had fallen into the sea, or Old Sarum, long owned by the Pitt family, which had three houses, seven voters – and two MPs. But this caricature does a disservice to the fantastical complexity of the electoral structure that had grown up by the 1770s. At that time Parliament had 558 members, comprising 489 from England, 45 from Scotland and the balance of 24 from Wales. Ireland had its own Parliament until 1800 so there were no Irish seats at Westminster, though some MPs with Irish connections sat in both places.
The English seats were heavily weighted towards the south and south-west, especially sea ports: Cornwall alone had forty-four Members of Parliament, and it and its four neighbouring counties of Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire contained roughly a quarter of the seats. London, by contrast, had 10 per cent of the whole population, but only ten seats; Nottingham and Newcastle, then both large and important towns, had just two seats each. Birmingham and Manchester had none.
The most important English constituencies were the forty counties, which returned two members each, chosen by ‘forty-shilling freeholders’, or those with freehold property worth £2 or forty shillings per year. The property qualification had originally been introduced in 1430, but three and a half centuries of inflation and exception-making had reduced the effective threshold and so greatly enlarged the voting population. However, the counties, while prestigious, were vastly outnumbered by the 203 cities and boroughs, from which a total of 405 MPs were elected (there were also four university seats). These city and borough seats ranged from near-universal male franchise through those controlled by local corporations to ‘burgage’ boroughs, where votes were attached to local properties, known as burgages, which could be bought and sold in order to achieve electoral control. At a time when voting was by open ballot, corruption was less than is often portrayed but nonetheless endemic by modern standards, and it varied by seat: undue influence could be exercised by landlords instructing tenant voters, by bribing a local corporation or simply by owning or controlling enough burgages.
For Burke, then, the options were limited. A county seat was out of the question for the son of a Dublin attorney, which was lucky because the generally wide franchises made elections, especially contested elections, prohibitively expensive to all but those with the wealthiest supporters. At the very least, voters expected to be lavishly wined and dined, or ‘treated’, by the different candidates. Treating remains an electoral offence today, but only if alcohol and meat are involved – it is an oddity of English law that vegetarians and teetotallers cannot be treated. In the eighteenth century, however, treating was endemic, and since elections often took weeks to conclude, the cost could be ruinous. In fighting for Chester in 1784 the Grosvenor family paid for 1,187 barrels of ale, 3,756 gallons of rum and brandy, and over 27,000 bottles of wine. These were pretty heroic numbers for a seat with just 1,500 voters.
An inebriated electorate was pliable in other ways too, albeit sometimes with disastrous results. George Selwyn, MP for Gloucester, wrote in 1761 that:
Two of my voters were murdered yesterday by an experiment which we call shopping, that is, locking them up and keeping them dead drunk to the day of election. Mr Snell’s agents forced two single Selwyns into a post chaise, where, being suffocated with the brandy that was given them and a very fat man that had the custody of them, they were taken out stone dead.
The most famous example of electoral expense is perhaps that of Yorkshire, where William Wilberforce’s two opponents in the bitterly contested election of 1807 each reputedly spent £100,000, or more than £6 million today; Wilberforce topped the poll, but out of a total of nearly 24,000 votes only 850 finally separated the three candidates. By comparison, the average election budget allowed by law for a parliamentary candidate in the final month of the 2010 general election, including all staff, office and equipment costs, campaign literature, merchandise and advertising, was approximately £12,000 – less than the cost of a single TV advertisement in a US congressional election. At the local level at least, there is extraordinarily little ‘money power’ in modern British politics.
To return: matters were further complicated from 1707 until the early twentieth century by a law which required those accepting an office of profit from the Crown to resign and fight a by-election. The principle was clear: ministerial office rewarded an MP personally and would likely distract him from the zealous duty of care owed to his constituents, so they were entitled to refuse him leave to accept. In practice, however, this discouraged good MPs in marginal seats from accepting office, and occasionally unhorsed those who did accept, as Winston Churchill found to his cost in 1908. It also all but ruled out those in county seats from doing so, since a by-election meant another round of enormous electoral expense. The result was that county seats were rarely contested, often divided up by agreement between prominent local families, and occupied by landed gentlemen with decidedly independent views. This only added to their prestige.
A ‘pocket’ borough, however – not quite ‘rotten’, but with a small enough number of votes to be effectively controlled by a local landowner or magnate – hardly offered a legitimate platform for someone who aspired to be a statesman. So in the face of an imminent general election, it was with some reluctance that Burke approached his patron Rockingham, and then at Rockingham’s behest was elected for the borough of Malton in Yorkshire on 11 October 1774. However, on the very same day he was summoned post-haste to stand for Bristol, where one of the declared candidates had suddenly withdrawn.
Unlike Malton, Bristol was a huge prize: the second city in Britain, an economic powerhouse and an ‘open borough’ whose wide franchise would confer legitimacy and independent authority. It was rich, and dominated not by a leisured gentry but by merchants who had made their money in trading with Ireland and America. For a politician like Burke, deeply engaged in trade issues and already vociferously opposed to taxing the American colonies, it seemed a perfect fit. So thought Richard Champion, a porcelain manufacturer and one of Bristol’s many influential Quakers, who had become his campaign manager. After a bitter and personal three-way fight lasting twenty-three bibulous days, in which Burke was denounced as a stooge, a papist and a friend to aristocratic tyranny, he was elected on 3 November as one of two members behind Henry Cruger, a radical. It was as the member for Bristol, and not for Malton, that Burke was returned to Parliament in 1774.